The Search Wikia

The widely-awaited open-source search engine, from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, makes it debut today.

Wikia Search Engine Goes Live Today

Search Wikia, the widely-awaited search engine from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, is slated to make its official debut today, Monday. It's been said that this open-source, community-driven search engine will eventually place it in competition with Google.

The search engine is still in very early alpha stage, and users who want to test-drive the engine shouldn't expect a Google-killer. It still needs time, and will need participation from volunteers to grow and be refined, Wales said.

With that in mind, Search Wikia is expected to be developed and refined, similarly to Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written and edited by a community of volunteer collaborators, who have expanded it and improved it over the years.

"Search Wikia is an extremely alpha project. It's a project to build a search engine and not a full-fledged competitor to Google yet. We want to make sure people understand that it's in its very early days," Wales said.

Wales expects the project to provide an alternative to commercial search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft.

"I don't know how long it will take to reach industry-standard quality search results, but I'd say at least two years," he said.

People interested in volunteering will find a variety of options at Search Wikia, including working with the software to improve and extend it, as well as suggesting pages for the index and evaluating and rating search results.

Those who register to participate in the project will join a social networking environment where they can have a list of friends, upload photos, build profiles and be notified of friends' actions.

Users of the search engine will be presented with what Wales calls a "mini article" at the top of the results list. This can be a photo, a text definition, an external link or whatever else has been determined is the best answer to that particular query.

Below the "mini article" will be the list of results, picked from the Search Wikia index, which on Monday will have anywhere between 50 million and 100 million Web pages. Wales concedes that number is small, but said it will continue to grow over time.

Users will be able to rank the quality of individual search results, and Search Wikia will factor in that feedback when solving future queries. "That way, people will be able to influence the algorithmic search results," he said.

Those who try to abuse the system for, say, search engine spamming purposes, are bound to be quickly noticed by administrators and other community members, and they will swiftly be blocked and banned, Wales said.